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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Fly Me To The Moon

Fly Me To The Moon is one of my favorite Frank Sinatra songs. Many singers and jazz players have covered this song over the years. It can either be great and really get you moving, or it can be super cheesy like Bill Murray singing "Star Wars". There are plenty of cheesy versions out on Youtube if you want to amuse yourself. I'm trying this one as a Latin tune rather than swing. This hopefully avoids the cheesy-ness associated with singers doing swing versions (I can hear the fingers snapping now!).

But I created another problem....

Whenever I'm playing anything Latin, I feel like I'm channeling Danny Samoza. Danny sang and played a barely credible electric piano to all sorts of Latin-ized songs at one of our college hangouts. The place was Montero's Bar and Grill in Brooklyn Heights, NY. Montero's is down at the end of Atlantic Avenue near the water. It catered mostly to Danish Seamen (yes, I spelled that right :-)) from the shipyards, working girls and others of questionable integrity, like college frat boys. The drinking age was 18 in those days. We heard Danny play often enough that whenever we heard any sort of a bad Latin number, we would say "Danny Samoza!" and then do an imitation. Nobody wants to be Danny Samoza, but hey, I still remember him after all of these decades.

The real Montero's... It is still open.....

Geek Alert

I recorded this version of Fly Me To The Moon as a bossa nova. This should be a pretty easy song to play, and it is a short (for jazz) 4 minute rendition. I've tried to cram a whole bunch of new things into these 4 minutes though, so it became a very difficult one to arrange and to play. I tried to steal some arrangement and lick ideas from Eldar. If you listen to him play this on youtube, you will see that this was a fool's errand. This kid has both a great feel for the song and tremendous technique. There isn't much that is realistically steal-able, but there is a fast lick at the end of the first chorus that I tried to take from him.

The end of the song is very different. He switches the song key (fancy term is "modulates") a half step up from C to Db for the last half of a chorus and the ending. This is a trick that is used usually with singers to add a sense of excitement to a pop song. You don't hear it very often in an instrumental jazz song. So I added that to the arrangement and it then became really hard to play.

With bossa novas you often hear the piano being used a horn would be. Ed showed me that the way they do this is to play the same single note improvised melody with both the left and the right hand. The notes are separated by 2 octaves. This is also not easy to do. Since the piano player is not playing any chords (called comping), the chords are provided by a guitar player. The first part of the second chorus is done with this piano-as-horn idea, and then the last part of the chorus is a bass solo by Neil Swainson.

For the final vamp (still modulated to Db) the guitar comes back in, and it frees me up to fade out on some spacey two-handed pentatonic stuff.

Download

If you would like to download one of these MP3s, right click on the song link and choose "Save Link As..."

Also, please note that there is an SCM music player available with some of the more recent recordings. It is not compatible with https: yet though, so you would need to access the blog using http://kenblog05.blogspot.com if you want to listen to the player

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About Me

I am a computer technology professional and music lover looking to share my learning experiences with other like-minded souls. I may be the one person out there not trying to sell you something or become a rock star. My dream is to build a community of people learning to play jazz a bit later in life: Supporting each other, collaborating, making new friends across borders, and just having some fun.